Designing customer oriented production planning system (COPPS)

The paper describes a new production planning and scheduling system in which production seats are first created based on forecasted demand, and then orders received are assigned to the seats. This system is named COPPS. The scheduling procedure and advantages of COPPS are discussed. The system performance of COPPS is compared with the traditional MRP through a simulation experiment. Although COPPS theoretically poses some minor problems yet to be solved, some Japanese manufacturing firms already established COPPs-like systems by constructing the information system which integrates both sales and production activities.